OAN Staff Brooke Mallory
3:15 PM – Friday, August 23, 2024
One of Canada’s two main freight railroads received a 72-hour strike notice from a workers union on Friday, just hours after the company’s trains had resumed service following a potentially disastrous stoppage.
According to union spokesperson Marc-André Gauthier, the Teamsters Canada Rail Conference filed a strike notice against Canadian National (CN) shortly after the company declared its intention to contest a court order forcing it into arbitration with the CN and Canadian Pacific Kansas City Ltd. railroads in order to end a lockout.
“This action will prolong the damage to our economy and jeopardize the wellbeing and livelihoods of Canadians, including union and non-union workers across multiple industries,” said Perrin Beatty, president and CEO of the Canadian Chamber of Commerce, in a statement.
Around sixteen hours after a lockout shut down the railroads, Labor Minister Steven MacKinnon said on Thursday afternoon that the parties would be forced into binding arbitration since the economic risk was too consequential to enable them to continue.
A week prior, he had expressed his hope that talks between the companies and the union would be successful rather than granting an order for arbitration.
“This is not about disobeying the minister’s order. It’s about exercising our right,” said Teamsters Canada President Francois Laporte on Friday. “We will our exercise our right within the legal framework.”
According to CN spokesman Jonathan Abecassis, trains operated by Canadian National started running at 7 a.m. nationwide.
At first, the action seemed to have prevented a work stoppage that could have caused severe economic damage to both Canada and the United States, as many businesses in both nations depend on railroads to transport their goods and raw materials.
Trains run by Canadian Pacific Kansas City Ltd., the second business, had remained idle while the union contested the arbitration ruling.
Rail shipments across the U.S. border as well as all rail freight handled in Canada, which was valued at over $1 billion Canadian (U.S. $730 million) every day and over 375 million tons of freight last year, ceased on Thursday. The fact that 30,000 or more passengers in Canada depend on CPKC’s lines for their trains also caused an impact.
During the lockout, trains operated by CPKC and CN continued to run in the United States and Mexico.
According to the U.S. Department of Transportation, billions of dollars’ worth of goods are transported by train between the United States and Canada every month.
Meanwhile, the 65,000 grain producers in the country who make up the group “Grain Growers of Canada” have urged that the railways and unions get back to work as soon as possible.
“For the good of Canada’s food, economic, and national security, we are calling on all parties to abide by yesterday’s directives and to work with, not against, the CIRB to resume railway service,” the group said. “Grain farmers will continue to lose $50 million a day with the continuance of a total shutdown of our national railways. The time is now to get Canada’s railways back on track,” they added.
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